Dues & Don’ts

Even in states where the Left seems completely unassailable, history has shown the tables can be turned just by defunding the public-sector unions that have become far too influential.

In the days following Donald Trump’s stunning (to

the mainstream media, at least) election in 2016, the same collection of enlightened pundits whose projections had failed so miserably were paraded before the cameras to try and make sense of it all. Most offered up the customary deep dive into voter demographics and exit polls, combined with a bit of conjec-

ture about the mood of the electorate — and more By JEFF RHODES VP for News & Information

than a few since-debunked conspiracy theories about Russians meddling with the tabulation procedures.

For whatever reason, though, one explanation that got little or no attention was the recent defunding of an essential Democratic special interest — public employee unions. But it’s a lesson that should be taken to heart by every American alarmed by the growing, but largely unreported, influence of special interests over the governing process but frustrated that there seems to be no solution.

Big Labor, of course, has been a major supporter of leftist politics for decades, but with only 6 percent of workers in the private sector currently paying dues

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By JEFF RHODES

VP for News & Information

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to a union, the real strength of the movement comes from unions representing government employees.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, however, there were telltale signs that particular bulwark was crumbling, including published news accounts that documented the weakness of Hilary Clinton’s ground game not only in hotly contested states like Ohio and Pennsylvania but also in the traditionally blue states of Wisconsin and Michigan.

A Nov. 16 Huffington Post article, headlined, “The Clinton Campaign Was Undone by Its Own Neglect and a Touch of Arrogance,” recounted that Clinton operatives in those two states reported an unaccustomed shortage of boots on the ground to knock on doors, man the phone banks and shepherd Democratic voters to the polls.

In Michigan alone, the Clinton team had roughly one-tenth as many paid canvassers as Sen. John Kerry deployed when he ran for president in 2004.

A similar scenario unfolded in Wisconsin, where state and local officials scrambled to raise nearly $1 million for efforts to get out the vote in the closing weeks of the campaign.

What Wisconsin and Michigan had in common — in addition to being traditionally Democratic strongholds — was that, for both, 2016 marked the first national election since they passed right-to-work legislation, giving public employees in those states a choice about whether to pay dues or agency fees to a union as a condition of employment.

And in the interim, thousands had taken advantage of the opportunity by opting out, blowing a huge hole in the revenue stream organized labor had grown accustomed to sharing with its Democratic friends.

A coincidence?

Consider, then, the example more than two decades earlier of Washington state, where a wildly popular (with the public, at least) ballot measure temporarily staunched the flow of someone else’s dues dollars into the left’s coffers. In 1992, fiscal conservatives collected more than a quarter of a million signatures on a citizen initiative authored by former Washington House of Representatives member and unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor Bob Williams. Among its other provisions, the measure stipulated that:

“No employer or other person or entity responsible for the disbursement of funds in payment of wages or salaries may withhold or divert a portion of an employee’s wages or salaries for contributions to political committees or for use as political contributions except upon the written request of the employee.”

The provision, dubbed “paycheck protection,” meant that, simply put, union leaders could longer assume members shared their political leanings and wanted to fund them. They

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actually had to ask permission before donating someone else’s hard-earned money to a leftist candidate or cause.

Predictably, the Democrat-dominated Washington State Legislature refused to act on the measure, which meant it could be presented to the voters on the November ballot as Initiative 134.

By this time, according to a Washington State Wire story in 2010:

“(L)abor unions had trouble making the argument that they ought to be allowed to make enormous contributions to political races. They threw up their hands. It passed with an overwhelming 73 percent.”

The result? In the subsequent 1994 election, Republicans in the Washington State House of Representatives went from a 66-32 minority in 1992 to a 58-40 majority. In the state Senate, the GOP flipped three seats and cut the Democrat advantage to 25-24. (Republicans earned an outright 26-23 majority in 1996).

At the federal level, Republican Slade Gorton won the only contested Senate seat, while GOP candidates took seven of the state’s nine seats in the House. Among those swept aside in the Red Tide was U.S. Rep. Tom Foley, who became the first sitting Speaker of the House to lose election since 1862.

It’s true the story was much the same elsewhere around the country that year, as voters expressed their displeasure with the first two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency by electing Republicans in huge numbers. But no state as solidly Democratic as Washington made such a remarkable transformation on Election Night.

While many factors undoubtedly contributed to the phenomenon, the impact of I-134 cannot be ignored.

Before the measure passed, Washington public employees — including teachers — had the right to request their union not use their dues for political purposes, but because unions made the opt-out process so difficult, only 20 percent of the workers bothered to exercise it. I-134 flipped the script completely by putting the burden on the unions instead.

Consequently, during the 1992 election, 80 percent of the workers declined to contribute — depriving the unions of 60 percent of their financing power with the stroke of a pen.

Obviously the unions couldn’t allow this to continue. The Washington Education Association (WEA), the state’s largest and most poli-tically active teacher’s union, responded by reinventing itself.

The union folded its old political action committee and created a new one in itsd place. The new PAC would take the money from the teachers who “opted in.”

Meanwhile, every union member would be required to contribute $12 a year to a new “community outreach program,” which would finance the union’s more indirect political efforts. One union official later testified it was “an internal ploy” to get around the new law.

As if the arrangement wasn’t sketchy enough, the community outreach program then proceeded to loan the PAC $162,255 for the 1994 political races — and then immediately forgave the loan.

The fraud was obvious for anyone to see.

Williams, who in 1991 founded a think tank that later became the Freedom Foundation, explained, “They’re laundering money is a polite way to put it.” The Freedom Foundation fired back in April 1996 by filing a complaint with Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission (PDC), which did its own investigation and, after finding even more wrongdoing on the union’s part, recommended the state take legal action.

Attorney General (and later Washington Gov.) Christine Gregoire announced plans to sue WEA, which prevented the Freedom Foundation from filing its own lawsuit. But in 1998, she worked out a settlement deal under which the union would reportedly pay a fine of $430,000 — at the time, the largest campaign finance penalty in state history.

Nearly three-quarters of that total, however, was structured as a “refund” to teachers — in essence, the fine amounted to nothing more than a temporary dues reduction.

More sinister, however, was a provision in the deal that “clarified” a gray area in the law to WEA’s advantage, allowing the union to pump member dues into the political action committee without asking permission — as long as the union contributions were properly reported. The state’s attorneys justified the action by claiming that part of the initiative hadn’t specifically mentioned unions.

Behind closed doors, with no debate or public input, Gregoire and her union allies — the same organizations that donated tens of thousands of dollars to her election campaigns before and after the settlement was announced — effectively stripped out the landscape-altering component of a ballot initiative approved by 72 percent of the state’s voters.

The result was all too predict-able.

By 1998, with unions once again free to spend as much of someone else’s money as they pleased, Democrats in Washington’s House of Representatives had reclaimed a 28-21 advantage, while the Senate was deadlocked 49-49. (Senate Democrats regained their majority in 2002 and haven’t relinquished it since.)

The three states have vastly different histories, demographics and cultures, but Washington, Michigan and Wisconsin all experienced precisely the same electoral shift in the immediate aftermath of legislation that (at least temporarily) choked off funding to their respective government-employee unions.

No doubt this explains with the unions have been fighting tooth and nail since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME effectively made the entire nation a right-to-work state.

If millions of public employees represented by groups like AFSCME, SEIU, the Teamsters and various teacher’s unions ever fully embrace their freedom to opt out and stop funding someone else’s political agenda with their dues money, the consequences could be devastating not only for organized labor, but for the leftist candidates and causes they so generously support.

And wouldn’t that be a shame?

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